Ethan Yang completed his PhD at Prof. Pierre Chaurand’s lab at the University of Montreal. His research primarily focused on elaborating new techniques to enhance the sensitivity and selectivity of MALDI-TOF imaging mass spectrometry for use in fundamental and clinical research to better elucidate lipid biomarkers on thin tissue sections. He obtained his B.Sc. at McGill University, majoring in Biochemistry. Since 2012, he has been an active member of the Let’s Talk Science site in Montreal, a national non-profit organization focused on promoting interest in STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) in youth. He is also a founding member and a current co-Chair of the MSACL Early Career Network (MSACL ECN).

Niloofar Abolhasani Khaje is a PhD candidate in Pharmaceutical Sciences with an emphasis in Pharmacology from the University of Mississippi under Prof. Joshua Sharp’s supervision. She has a BSc in Chemical Engineering from Sharif University of Technology in Tehran, Iran. She is passionate about developing new mass spectrometry-based methods for studying the structure-function relationships of biomolecules. She has developed novel methods for data collection of Hydroxyl Radical Protein Footprinting (HRPF) via Fast Photochemical Oxidation of Proteins (FPOP) that allow for more efficient collection and analysis of the resulting data. She accomplished this by developing an LC-MS/MS method that allows coelution of isomeric oxidized peptides, which don’t coelute under standard Reverse Phase (RP) LC-MS/MS methods, while separating different peptides. She also demonstrated that the coeluted isomeric peptides could be accurately quantitated using data-dependent acquisition methods instead of the time consuming data-independent methods that have to be used with RP methods. In collaboration with other members of the Sharp lab and labs across the country, Niloofar is developing methods to transform HRPF-FPOP MS into a structural technique. This requires adapting current methods in computational modeling to use HRPF-FPOP data to allow for structure determination of biomolecules that would be difficult using the standard X-ray crystallography, NMR, and cryo-EM methods.

I am a current PhD candidate in Clinical Bioanalytical Chemistry at Cleveland State University conducting research on colorectal cancer by DIA proteomics.

Hoda Safari Yazd is a Ph.D. candidate in analytical chemistry at the University of Florida and working under the supervision of Prof. Richard Yost and Dr. Timothy Garrett. She received her B.Sc. in chemistry from Sharif University of Technology in 2015 and her M.Sc. in computational chemistry from the same school in 2017. Hoda's research at UF primarily focuses on combining analytical chemistry tools and scientific programming for the metabolomic discovery of rare disorders. She is currently working on two projects; the first project concentrates on the detection of new biomarkers in meningiomas to improve early detection of this disease by employing machine learning as a tool on mass spectrometry-based metabolomics data. The second project is focused on the characterization of rare X-chromosome deletion disorders using metabolomics and lipidomics workflows by UHPLC-HRMS on neural progenitor cells. Hoda is one of the founding members and main organizers of the MSACL Early Career Network (MSACL-ECN).

Ólöf Gerður is a PhD student at Margret Thorsteinsdottir´s and Sigridur Klara Bodvarsdottir lab in Iceland. She is working on a collaborative project with Zoltan Takat´s lab at Imperial College London where she uses imaging mass spectrometry to identify biomarkers in breast tissue. Ólöf obtained her B.Sc. at University of Iceland in Biochemistry with focus on molecular biology. She achieved her M.Sc. at University of Copenhagen (Denmark) in Human Biology, with focus on cellular and molecular biology. She has 3 years experience working as a research assistant for both University of Iceland and University of Copenhagen as well as she did a short-term internship at the Danish pharmaceutical company, Lundbeck.
Ólöf is a current co-Chair of the MSACL Early Career Network (MSACL ECN).

PhD candidate at Imperial College London studying extracellular vesicles as body fluid-based biomarkers for cancer diagnosis. B.Sc. in biology and M.Sc. in molecular biology, cell biology and genetics focused on omics technologies. Research experience in lipidomics, metabolomics, proteomics, molecular/cell biology as well as extracellular vesicles, cancer and malaria research.

I joined Murdoch University in 2019 as a Senior Lecturer in Phenomics based at the Australian National Phenome Centre (ANPC), specialising in diabetes and obesity. I received my BSc(Hons) in Biomedical Sciences in 2005 from the University of Newcastle, UK, followed by my MSc in Forensic Science at King’s College London in 2008. I completed my PhD at the same institution in analytical chemistry, in particular liquid chromatography and mass spectrometry, for the detection of doping agents in sport.

I have worked for instrument manufacturers (Waters Corporation and Shimadzu UK Ltd) as well as in academia (Imperial College London and the University of Reading, UK). My research interests are in the application of chromatography and mass spectrometry for metabolic phenotyping to investigate the interactions between our genes and environment in terms of disease risk. I am particularly interested in the influence of lifestyle factors such as diet and exercise in health and disease, and the role of the microbiome.

My expertise are in analytical chemistry and metabolomics and I have taught into a range of undergraduate and postgraduate courses on these topics, as well as delivering hands-on training in these areas.